Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist - Part 2

Ok, I've put this off long enough. Well I really haven't been putting it off. I've been doing a lot of reading and research because what I share in the next few posts, I don't want to be just my opinion." Finally we have come to the point where we need to talk about Church music. And really this is where I've been heading this whole time, but I wanted to lay a solid biblical foundation about the creation and corruption of music. I want you to understand that music is not just an invention of man but was created by God for a particular purpose and that is the glory of God. I heard Dr. David Jeremiah make a statement one time that I think makes the point. This is as close as I can come to a quote. He said that because music was specifically created by God for the glory of God, that any music that doesn't accomplish that end is a prostitution of the gift. That's powerful. Now what we have to decide is this, does the music that is being used in our churches glorify God? If it does fine, but if it doesn't it needs to be changed. I don't know of any Christian music leader who would disagree with that statement. (Although I've been around long enough to know that there are probably some who would.)

Now you may remember that in my very first post I told you that I am in some ways a product of the Jesus movement and the Jesus music of the 70's. (If you haven’t read the previous posts, which began in February 2009, I strongly encourage you to do so before you read this one.) But as a pastor I was for many years also the product of a particular philosophy of ministry called pragmatism. (That first post was called Confessions of a Reformed Pragmatist", and really everything I have written since has been and is under that heading.)

Now what is pragmatism? Well in this context it refers to a philosophy of ministry that believes that the end justifies the means. In other words, whatever works is good, and whatever doesn't work is bad. It's really sort of a Machiavellian approach to ministry, by which I mean the employment of cunning and duplicity, even deceit in order to achieve a goal or end. What is good in this particular context is numbers, (Church growth).

I know, I'll be lambasted for that last statement because some will counter that their motivation is not simply for numbers but for souls, to reach the lost. And I will concede that some are probably genuine in that motivation. However even given that concession, even acknowledging that motive, does it justify the use of extra biblical means to get lost people to come to church? I contend that it does not and there are many reasons, which we will discuss later.

As I mentioned, for the first 15 years of my 25 years in ministry I was a pragmatist. And the reason I was, like so many other pastors, is because that's just the way I learned to do ministry. That's what I was taught. That's what I observed being modeled before me. When I went to pastor's conferences and read books on ministry the subject was always the same. Grow a big church, and here's how you can do that. It's still that way. And the people that are placed before you to teach you how to be a “Dynamic Pastor" are always the pastors of the big churches as if the pastor of a small church could never be an adequate model. And I was given a grocery list of means and methods about getting lost people to come to church and reaching more people and adding more numbers. And so I did them and I padded the role and pushed to increase the membership and grow the budget so we could reach more people. And we baptized a lot of people and we started a lot of programs and so I felt somewhat justified in how I was doing it.

Until one day I did a membership analysis. I began to contact and look at the lives of all those people who had walked down the isle in my churches and had shaken my hand and prayed a prayer and made a profession of faith and been baptized. And what I discovered astounded me. I found that I was reaching numbers. Attendance was growing. We were seeing lots of people become professors of faith, but they were not possessors of a changed life. They were not disciples. They were religious but lost. After 15 years most of them were not walking in obedience to Christ and his Word. Many of them were never genuinely saved and were deceived into believing they were, by an “easy believism” that started with a pragmatic approach to ministry. That's what I want to talk about in the next few posts. And we will address all these things in more detail later.

Now one of the things that I did in my early ministry that contributed to his end had to do with music. One of the things that I was taught by the growing Seeker Sensitive" movement in the contemporary church was that to reach the lost of this generation we have to change with the times. Now what I didn't realize at the time was the extent to which these changes would go. As I alluded to last week, church leaders today in an even more provocative shift in ministry philosophy, called The Emergent Church Movement", want us to literally embrace the culture and in many ways become like it supposedly in order to reach it.

But at the time and to the extent that was being advocated then, I like many other younger pastors, began to introduce so-called contemporary music into my churches. And it was easy for me to want that. As I said in the first post, I listened to “Jesus Music" and really over the years grew along with the contemporary Christian music industry as it moved from just a very few singers and musicians when I began listening to it in the mid 70's, to the giant institution that it became. It was a part of my life. I introduced my children to it. I promoted it.

Ten years ago I had a band made up of students that frequently led music in my church. It consisted of two electric guitars, an electric bass guitar, and a full drum set. There were others who also sang with the band that would today be called a praise team. We were “trendsetters” because no other churches in our particular area had made that drastic a move.

Now why am I telling you this? Again simply because I don't want anyone to say, He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just an old timer. He doesn't understand 'our kind of music'". I do understand. I was there before many of you. I listened to it. I promoted it. I enjoyed it. BUT I WAS WRONG! Wrong about what? Let me address that?

I want to be understood up front that I'm not saying that all contemporary Christian music is bad. You already know from previous posts that some of it is, but not all. I'm also not saying that it's always wrong to have instruments other than a piano and organ in the church. That would be an unbiblical statement and we may deal with that more. But I am saying that some of the music that is being used in worship services today has no place in the Church and that will be developed more in coming posts.

So what brought about the change in me? It was the realization that I mentioned earlier, that the vast majority of people we were reaching" with contemporary music, along with all the other pragmatic methods, were not true disciples. This became a huge burden and I spent significant time in prayer and shed a lot of tears over it. I felt as though I had wasted the first 15 years of ministry. Then not long after, I read a book that changed my whole perspective and philosophy of ministry. It was "Ashamed of the Gospel" by Dr. John MacArthur.

As we proceed through the next few posts I will share some of the insights I learned from that book as well as from many other sources. I should mention for any readers who may not be familiar with Dr. MacArthur and who think that the only way to build a large church is by using the pragmatic approach, (which will be more fully explained in future posts), that he pastors a very large church in Sun Valley California with a Sunday morning attendance of over 6000 people. He uses none of the pragmatic approaches to ministry that the Seeker movement or the Emergent movement advocate. Yet they baptize 50-60 new believers each month and approximately 75% of them are age 30 and under. Many are students at USC or UCLA. There is no dancing, no clowns, no Starbucks, and no gimmicks. There's not even a gymnasium or a bowling alley. Instead there is solid biblical teaching week after week, month after month, year after year. If you ask Dr. MacArthur what his secret is, he'll tell you simply, that there is no secret. “God blesses his truth.” It is that message that I want to communicate to you.